In a public organization such as a police department and a fire department, for example, when a security service is performed in an event or an entertainment, and when a disaster, an incident, an accident, or the like occurs, refining the service such as grasping an on-site situation, and detecting a suspicious person and a suspicious object by utilizing a video (a captured image) is required. Configuring an independent network directed to temporary image distribution, utilizing a mobile carrier network, and the like for distributing an image to be utilized in such a service are also put into practice. Further, configuring a public-oriented long term evolution (LTE) is also studied for the future. A public-oriented LTE is also referred to as a public safety LTE (PS-LTE).
In order to utilize an image analysis technique for refining a public service, a high-quality image is required. In order to grasp an on-site situation when a disaster, an incident, an accident, or the like occurs by means of an image, and in order to detect a sign of an incident or an accident, it is necessary to acquire beforehand the image of a place where a disaster, an incident, an accident, or the like may occur. In view of the above, a communication infrastructure for transmitting an image from a place where a disaster, an incident, an accident, or the like may occur is necessary. However, it is not possible to predict a time and a place when and where a disaster, an incident, an accident, and the like occur. Therefore, it is not realistic to configure in advance a large-capacity public-oriented communication infrastructure in all possible places where a disaster, an incident, an accident, and the like may occur. Thus, effectively utilizing a bandwidth of an existing public-oriented network is required in a public service using an image. When an image is used in a public service, all regions in the image may not always be important. An important region is a region associated with a disaster, an incident, an accident, or the like, for example. A region where such an important and necessary target object, for example, is displayed is referred to as a region of interest (ROI). In the following description, an ROI is also described as a region of interest. In the following description, an ROI indicates a region where a phenomenon for which grasping a situation is required is generated in an environment captured in an image, for example.
For example, PTL 1 discloses a monitoring system for controlling a predetermined ROI in such a way that the predetermined ROI enhances image quality as compared with a region other than the ROI.
PTL 2 discloses an ROI region setting device in which an ROI recognized by a method selected from among a plurality of different ROI recognition methods is set as an ROI region.
PTL 3 discloses a monitoring camera and a monitoring system for adjusting a capturing region of the monitoring camera, based on a relative priority of an occurring event, when a predetermined event such as an accident, an incident, or a disaster occurs at a same time multiply.
PTL 4 discloses a moving image communication system in which an amount of encoding image data in a region other than an ROI is reduced, before transcoding of discarding a part of image data acquired by performing progressive coding according to a network bandwidth in which an image is distributed is performed. PTL 5 discloses a moving image communication system in which a size of a region being set in such a way that image quality is enhanced as compared with another region is reduced or increased depending on a measured communication rate.
PTL 6 discloses an image distributing device in which a gazing region gazed by a user is selected from among a plurality of regions acquired by dividing an image, based on a detected line-of-sight direction of the user, and encoding quality of the selected gazing region is enhanced.